Great Dismal Swamp

The Great Dismal Swamp route was amazingly beautiful and stressful. The world was starting to look like a Virginia winter again and it was either drizzling or raining most of the day. The stressful part was mostly because that part of the ICW has a lot of deadheads, which are basically almost neutrally buoyant logs which mostly live on the bottom but sometimes get kicked up and take a little while to sink. They are not visable above the water (for the most part), but all of a sudden, "bam" one hits the hull. We hit about 4, keeping a vigilant watch, but we think there was no damage. In order to keep a good look out we had to open one of the front windows, so it was a cold and wet trip.



We had called the locks the night before to confirm the 8:30, 11:00, 1:30, 3:30 opening schedule and were told that one of the locks would open whenever. That information ended up being incorrect and we had to wait for almost two hours at the first lock. Luckily there was just enough room to drop the anchor, so Ben worked on lunch and we listened to our story as we waited. We were a little worried because it seemed like the back gate of the lock was having trouble closing, but the operator worked it out, the gate closed and the water rushed in. We went up about 8 feet. After opening the front gate, the lock operator jumped in his car and became the bridge operator.






The second lock operator decided to break the rules since it was winter, not very busy, and a storm was coming. He let us through the lock at about 2:30. Both locks took about 20 minutes between the southbound gates closing, the lock filling, and the northbound gates opening. It seemed like we were going to make it to Norfolk just before the storm hit. Sadly, we hadn't realized we had one more opening bridge which was restricted. The book said the bridge was restricted until 5:30, but when we called the operator said 6:30, but there was a commercial boat that had scheduled an opening for 4 pm and had not showed up yet. We got to the bridge and waited for about 20 minutes, watching the thunderstorm approach through XM weather on the chart plotter. At about 5:15 we decided to turn back and head to the marina 3 miles south. Just a few minutes after we turned around we heard the commercial tug hail the bridge. The bridge tender hailed us back and had the tug wait for us to come back to the bridge! We made it into Norfolk just as the storm started and got absolutely drenched tying up the boat (and then retying up the boat because the 30 Amp power on the first slip was not working). Once dry we headed to Joe's Crab Shack and spent a few hours the warm, dry comfort of the bar.

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P.S. We're home! More to come on the sail from Norfolk to Deltaville once we are settled back in at home.

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